


One More Day

by anony_mouse



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Depression, Exhaustion, Found Family, Gen, How Do I Tag, No Beta, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, Whump, executive disfunction, kind of, shitty self care, spoilers for the whole series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-28 21:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13912131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anony_mouse/pseuds/anony_mouse
Summary: It’s been fifteen years, four months, and twenty one days since Lucretia gave up her family to save them all. For a stupid plan that wasn’t even necessary in the end. Go figure.





	One More Day

**Author's Note:**

> See notes at the end for spoilers and possible triggers.  
> (also, I'll be going back to posting DoM, I'm not abandoning it, don't worry.)

It’s been fifteen years, four months, and twenty one days since Lucretia gave up her family to save them all. For a stupid plan that wasn’t even necessary in the end. Go figure.

It’s been three years, two months, and sixteen days since they stopped the Hunger.

It’s been one year, nine months, and three days since Lucretia last spoke to any of the former crew of the _Starblaster._

She tries to tell herself that they’re just busy. That they’re settling into their lives. Magnus, Merle, and Taako have all settled down. They’re opening up schools and taking responsibility for other people. Davenport sailed out first chance he got to explore the oceans and adjust to not being a walking catatonia patient. Lup and Barry have been adjusting to their new job and are spending their time off catching up on lost stolen time.

She tries to tell herself that. But the shaking in her hands whenever she tries to write says otherwise. The Voidfish are gone, but Lucretia hasn’t been able to bring herself to put ink to paper since the day of Story and Song.

It’s a fitting punishment, she supposes, for the chronicler who wrote her friends lives out of existence. No one will be able to use words she doesn’t write against them- not even herself.

She mostly tries not to dwell on it.

But there are days when she drowns in a hundred years of memories and the suffocating silence of her quarters. During her twelve years of isolation, she moved forward with the knowledge that success would bring them back. She had a goal, and eventually, she had something like friends amongst the BOB. 

Now, those she had counted as friends have moved on, and while the new BOB has a goal, it's too nebulous. Too impossible to see the end of. Too much like those years before they’d had a plan, when their only choice was to do what lay in front of them and nothing more. The familiar lack of concrete goals makes it difficult to set her mind to the task. To not lose the battle with the ever-present maelstrom at the edges of her mind.

More often than not, she wins, but with each passing month, Lucretia spends fewer days managing and more days losing herself to her own thoughts. She tries to take it one day at a time- it’s less exhausting to only need to work through a day rather than any longer metric of time.

She’d lost the battle today.

The tidy stacks of papers from her desk are floating around the room as blackened ash, along with her latest attempt at a notebook (empty for months, save the hesitant drops of ink on the first page marking each failed attempt to start again). The only thing keeping her journals from joining the frantically formed heap is her decision to entrust them to Angus when he left the base to do with as he wished. 

The room is filled with fumes of smoke and the spilled lavender essence Killian had given her last Candlenights. Smoke twirls lazily up from the pile of burning papers in the center of the room and stings at her eyes and throat but frankly, she can’t be bothered to care.

She remains, arms curled over her knees, sitting pressed against her desk, head hanging between her arms, and hands throbbing softly for some time. Lucretia wonders distantly when she’d put her hands close enough to the fire to burn them.

It doesn’t matter.

She isn’t sure how long she’s sat on the floor, but eventually, she musters the energy from the relentless pit of endurance that churns away in her gut like a living swamp. Heaving herself upwards, she trails about the room, picking up trinkets and righting shelves, ~~erasing~~ cleaning away the evidence. With dull, practiced movements, she scoops the last of the ash into a bin and casts a tidy spell she’d learned in her IPRE days to clean up the ink and lavender spills.

Finally, certain that there is no proof of her breakdown, she dusts herself off and makes a note to replace her stationary and writing set.

Hefting the bin full of rubbish and ignoring the ache as it digs into her hands, she steps out of her office into the clean, familiar halls of the BOB.

She just has to get through one more day.

…

It’s been fifteen years, seven months, and thirteen days. 

It’s been three years, five months, and twelve days.

It’s been one year, eleven months, and twenty nine days and Lucretia has lost another battle.

She’s in exactly the same position as she was last time. As she always is. Watching the papers burn merrily, choking on smoke, and feeling a bone-deep ache that has nothing to do with her magically aged joints, the ghost of absent touches on every inch of her skin.

Lucretia digs her back a little harder against the desk and pretends that it helps.

She watches the flames start to burn themselves out, unable to find purchase on the flame-resistant carpets, and tucks her head into her arms, savoring the dull throb in her palms where she’d been too slow to retrieve her hands as the flames leapt to life over the empty pages.

Time passes- there’s no artifacts or relics out there to stop it anymore- but Lucretia isn’t aware of it. The swamp of her endurance is heavy and thick and she is unwilling to trawl through it to pull out any energy at all.

So she sits.

The fire has burned itself to cinder and even the smoke has dispersed itself throughout the room until it’s no longer discernible from the rest of the suffocatingly dead air. And still, she sits.

Her joints begin to ache from her lack of movement, but a few more hurts amongst a sea of them are hardly even noticed, and still she sits.

She wonders listlessly if sleep or some other reprieve will come to her in the silence, but it never does.

She just has to get through one more day.

With a quiet breath, Lucretia stands.

…

It’s been fifteen years, eight months, and two days. 

Three years, six months, and one day. 

Two years, no months, and eighteen days and Lucretia sits.

She might have the days wrong now. She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting here. She’d already lost time staring at the blank paper and pen before her for a while before she’d snapped into action.

There is no lavender left to spill, though she’s kept the bottle until now.

She’s pretty sure that she can see it in the crackling flames before her, and she can't bring her shaking hands to move and grab it out. She’s too tired (though not quite exhausted enough yet to not feel a prick of guilt.)

The fire has just begun to burn down, running out of fresh materials to consume. Lucretia remembers being caught in a forest fire in cycle 56 and feels the echo of flame lick away her skin and the stench of ash and burnt meat choke her senses as she watches the pages curls into black shells and break off to float around the room in a morbid dance.

Her eyes flutter closed, though sleep doesn't come, as ever.

And then the door kicks open with enough force to scatter the blackened dust and flames flying across the room.

Her body reacts with decades of muscle memory of fear and fighting and jumps away from the sound and the movement and the oncoming swarm of flaming parchment. She’s on her feet, wand in hand and pointed at the door before her mind has even registered the intrusion.

“Yo, we need to have a convo ‘bout-”

_Shit._

Lucretia opens her mouth to say… something. Anything. But her mind comes up blank, unable to come up with any spell or response that could fix this. Her eyes are teary from the smoke, and a familiar dryness in her throat makes her wonder if she could even croak out a spell right now if she had one. Her robes are rumpled and every inch of her is stiff and useless, and the only thing she can bring herself to do in the face of all this is lower the wand to her side and stare at her intruder.

For his part, Taako doesn’t seem particularly inclined to do much differently.

His eyes follow her wand as it falls to her side before flicking up to her face, then down to the tufts of flame now scattered across her office, to her desk, surrounded by trinkets swept to the floor, and a half a dozen other places before zeroing back to her hands.

“What the fuck?”

“Taako.” Her voice is scratchy and low, and Lucretia is surprised to find that not all of it is from the smoke.

“ _What the fuck_.”

“I- _ahem_ \- I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“ _What. The. Fuck_.”

Lucretia falls silent, eyes flicking away from the elf’s thin face. The exhaustion that had vanished when the door slammed open creeps back up like a water-soaked cloak, to weigh on her shoulders.

“What is this?” Her words fail, and the tired paralysis that she’d been missing since his entrance returns with a vengeance.

“Hey! I asked you a question!” The elf stomps forward, wand hand flicking out with a soft Gust of Wind to blow out the fires around the room and ushering the smoke out the door. Lucretia flinches as he steps into her space, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body and smell the cinnamon scent in his hair that seemed to be unique to him and Lup. 

“Hey! Director lady, _what is this_?” Lucretia’s eyes don’t meet his, instead wandering to see his ornately bedazzled wand. She distantly recalls Lup’s gleeful face as she gave it to her brother three years ago ‘to replace the Umbra Staff, because like hell am I going to look at that thing again for at least a decade, I swear!’

Strong fingers grip under her chin and tilt her face upwards- not unkindly- to meet stunningly bright eyes.

“Lucretia. What happened?”

She can feel a stinging sensation start at her face, painful and almost unfamiliar, but Lucretia can’t seem to pay it any mind- every inch of her focus is on the single point of contact at her chin. She is so absorbed in the heat of his hand that she fails to notice her blurring vision or the lump in her throat that threatens to choke her more than the smoke ever did.

It’s like shattering a window.

One moment, she’s standing, rigid and still. And the next, she’s falling to the ground, knees buckling painfully, wand tumbling from her numb grasp, and consciousness fleeing to the sounds of a hoarse shout.

And then nothing.

…

She wakes up to the sound of voices, barely restrained, and tense.

“-cked for every spell I could think of! There’s nothing! And Merle’s out on one of his ‘adventures’ so he’s not answering his Stone and _apparently_ there’s not a _single_ cleric or bard on the _entire fucking base_ because they’re all out dealing with the mess in Rockport right now!” She knows that voice. Her tired brain refuses to conjure up a name or face to go with it, but she feels herself relax as the familiar tones snap above her.

“I’m not sure it’s a spell, Koko.” Oh, she knows that voice too. Like the first one, she feels it calming her to her core.

“Then _what the fuck is it?_ “

“You brought her here- didn’t you feel it?”

“I was a bit busy freaking the fuck out because _her eyes rolled up into her fucking skull when I touched her_ , so no I didn’t feel anything!” Lucretia feels a small frown pull at her forehead at the panic in that voice. She doesn’t like to hear it panicking. 

“She’s thin. Like, _really_ thin. _Starving_ thin.”

“What the _fuck_? I know everyone’s hella busy or whatever planetside, but it’s not like they don’t have food up here! And even if they didn’t she could go down and get chow literally anywhere in the world!”

“When’s the last time anyone saw her come planetside? When’s the last time she left her office? Those clothes are a few days old, at least.” The second voice isn’t as tense, but she can hear a sour note in it as well. “Those burns in her hands- some of those are _weeks_ old. And none of them have been treated.”

“What are you saying Lup?” _Lup._

_Lup. Koko._

Taako. The office.

_Shit._

The voices stop. Oh. She’d said that out loud. 

There’s a beat, and then: “ _What the fuck, Lucy_.”

“Taako, don't.”

“Don’t ‘Taako, don't’ me, Lulu, you’re just as upset as I am! I want to know why the fuck she’s been starving herself up here in her fucking office!” Lucretia opens her eyes, and sees Taako’s face, twisted in concern and anger, hovering inches away from her own.

“I didn’t realize I was.” The words rake across her smoke-damaged throat unpleasantly.

“You didn- _how do you not realize that you’re starving to death_?!” Lup pulls her brother away from what Lucretia now realizes is an infirmary bed and she can’t help but be selfishly grateful as his voice hits a register that’s painful to hear. Brows twitching, the former lich casts a Silencing spell at him and turns back to the bed.

“Luce. What the fuck?” Her voice is softer, though no less intense.

“I just-” _I just couldn’t face the prospect of talking to anyone. I couldn’t bear to go out in those empty halls again. I couldn’t bring myself to bother with something so worthless as changing._

The words don’t come, and the lump in her throat swells again.

“Lucretia. When’s the last time you ate?” Lucretia shakes her head. She can’t remember, “how about the last time you slept?” Two days ago. She’d passed out on a stack of reports about the avalanche in Rockport that had temporarily stopped construction. She’d slept for four hours and then woken up to find that there had been a second, larger avalanche that had trapped the first rescue crews and a few others.

Lup’s lips tighten as if she can tell what the answer will be. Taako’s dramatic motions resume in the background, though the Silencing spell’s effects linger.

“Okay. This is not acceptable. You don’t get to do this to yourself. I love you, Luce, but I don’t want to come collect your sorry ass for another couple decades, do you understand me?” 

Lucretia knows what Lup means, but her mind turns, for the first time in _years_ \- for the first time since the end of the Bureau of Balance, really- to the future and she sees herself alone at her desk for another _couple decades_ and then just like that, the stinging is back. This time, she recognizes it as tears.

One hundred years of life on the run from the Hunger. Twelve years alone, searching for the terrible mistakes they’d made and cast into the world. Two years of isolation. And now, Lucretia gives into despair.

“No. Please-” her voice is scratchy and painful, even more so than in her office, but she hardly notices, too caught up in the idea of _years and years_ alone in this home-turned-tomb that she built for herself. “Please. I can’t do this anymore. Don’t leave me here alone again, _please_. I don’t want to. I _can’t_.”

The tears are blinding, salt stinging dry eyes and turning the room to blurry patches color. Lucretia doesn’t see Lup’s face twist into something like horror, or Taako freeze behind her. She doesn’t hear Lup’s voice over the roar of blood to her ears or the rattle of Taako’s rings striking the side of her bed as he jerks towards her.

The tight grip of a warm hand jolts her from the panic attack, and Lucretia realizes that her own hands have come up from her sides to clutch at her hair. Fingers card through her own, loosing them from the curls of hair that she hasn’t cut in at least a year now. The fingers are slim and callused and warm and quite possibly the best thing she’s ever felt in her life.

She turns her hand to hold them, and when they respond with a quick squeeze, she grips them back like a drowning man’s last lifeline.

Then, more hands reach out and touch her, grasping her other hand, running up her arms, pulling her upright into an embrace that is as warm and healing as any bond magic. Lucretia drinks the contact in without even registering what is happening or who is hugging her.

Soft voices croon in her ears, shushing her sobs and calming her with words in a mix of familiar languages that she cannot even begin to translate. But out of the jumble of words and lilting tones, she hears her salvation.

“ _You are not alone._ “

**Author's Note:**

> CW: (spoilers) Lucretia nearly kills herself overworking herself without eating or sleeping. It's not intentional per se, but she's not really trying to stay alive.
> 
> I know that some of this is not fully canon-compliant but w/e. Why was Taako there? Who knows? But I felt it would be a very Taako thing to not talk to someone for three years and then kick down their door. 
> 
> So I have a lot of feels in the general direction of TAZ and apparently my brain has decided that Lucretia is gonna get the brunt of that. I cried like three times writing this, and there's a really good chance I'll be doing more of these. 
> 
> Also, I don't have a beta for any of my TAZ works so... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.
> 
> At request, some fics for your reading pleasure (cw for suicidal ideation, attempts, feels attacks, and general not-okayness):  
> [no halo](https://archiveofourown.org/series/905400) and [Lucretia](https://archiveofourown.org/series/878721) by BlueMoonHound. They're intertwined, with _no halo_ being the non-canon bits. I'm a particular fan of [Buttercups and Belladonna](https://archiveofourown.org/series/916158)  
> [weather-beaten in a losing battle](https://archiveofourown.com/series/789675) by tardigradeschool. Less Lucretia-centric.  
> [i'm looking for a place to start (and everything feels so different, now) ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12511412) by Yevynaea  
> [Try Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12012387) by enjolrolo. Heavy suicide cw.  
> [Tell Me You Hate Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12478120) by BlackJade  
> 


End file.
